What is consciousness, and how does that definition affect our perception of our reality?

Consciousness is one of the most hotly debated subjects by philosophers, psychologists, but not physicists. There have been over 20,000 papers written on consciousness. Never have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

I'm a physicist. When we see something new, we create a model, a model that has the essence of the subject we're looking at. And then we locate its position in space, its position with regard to other particles, like atoms. And then, finally, we fast-forward it and go into the future. We simulate the future with this model. That's how Newton came up with the theory of gravity, how Einstein came up with the theory of space-time.

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Well, I have a new theory of consciousness, and that is: Consciousness is all the feedback loops necessary to create a model of yourself in space, in relationship to others, and in time, especially forward in time. This means that animals are conscious, and we can even rank them numerically by counting the number of feedback loops involved in each of these behaviors. So a thermostat would have one unit of consciousness that measures temperature. A flower would have maybe 10 units of consciousness because it measure temperature, sunlight, gravity, moisture, things like that. A reptile would have even more, maybe several hundred, because it locates its position in space. Then monkeys are even higher than that because they have to locate their ranking in society via emotions.

We're at the highest level because we daydream. We see the future, we predict the future, and animals do not. Animals, to the best of our [knowledge], have no concept of our tomorrow. We are obsessed with planning, strategizing, and tomorrow. And that, I think, typifies human consciousness. We could also use this to measure intelligence. Intelligence, I believe, is not measured by IQ. To me, intelligence is again the ability to see the future.

Could there be another level of consciousness that we don't know about yet? Would that be the next level?

I don't think so. I think that space, time, and relation to others are probably all there is. I could be wrong, of course. But I think when we encounter aliens in outer spaceand one day it's going to happenthey need to be more intelligent than us because they see the future better than us. They outwit us. They see more outcomes, they see more scenarios, more daydreams, much better and more realistically than we do, and they can run circles around us because they see the future.

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They will be like that, or they could be like that?

They could be like that. When we meet intelligent creatures from outer space, they'll be intelligent. How intelligent they are with respect to us is debatable.

You write about recording and implanting memories. What is the practical use of that for humans?

The goal is to create a brain pacemakera brain pacemaker that uploads memories into people with Alzheimer's disease, because that's going to be the disease of the century, Alzheimer's. The first memory was uploaded into a mouse last yeara world historic achievement. Eventually we'll do it with primates. And after that, perhaps humans, maybe with Alzheimer's.

People with Alzheimer's need to know where their keys are, who they are, what their children look like . . . memory skills for many people who have fading memories. Beyond that, maybe one day we'll be able to learn all the materials we flunked in college; we'll be able to learn calculus and physics and things we flunked in college by having our memory uploaded. Now that is science fiction, of course, but it's conceivable because now we know how to upload a memory. Before we didn't know how to do that. Now we know how to do it, via the hippocampus.

So you envision a future in which people record all of their brain activity so they can tap into it later in life?

Yeah, and also send it on to the Internet. The next generation of Internet may be the Internet of emotions, the Internet of memories. So if you win a goal medal at the Olympics, you can share it with all your friends on Facebook. Facebook will be a Facebook of memories, emotions, and feelings, rather than text messages and digital data.

How far off are these advances?

In the next decade, we would begin to experiment with humans, with the goal being the brain pacemaker. And the decade after that, maybe you have practical implications. Workers can learn new skills so they're not marginalized by changes in the workforce. Maybe students will be able to learn simple things by hitting the play button on a computer screen. And then further down the line, maybe vacation: You can experience vacations you've never had, relationships with people you've never had. That's a possibility.

What kind of roadblocks are scientists coming up against right now? Are they mostly legal and ethical?

Yes. For example, we have a forgetful pilla pill that allows you to forget traumatic experiences. But some people in the President's Commission on Ethics actually disagree on the utility of a forgetful pill because they said that memory is good for you. Bad experiences are good for youyou learn as a consequence. However, I don't think so. I think if something is so traumatic that it paralyzes you, prevents you from having a decent marriage and having a job and relationships with people . . . if it's that severe, we should allow forgetful pills.

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Also, there are people with photographic memories, people who can memorize 15,000 books and tell you page for page what's on them. This is controversial, but one theory is that people who have too much memory . . . have forgotten how to forget. The brain records, but also the brain erases afterward. And the erase mechanism may be broken in these individuals, so the tape recorder just keeps on recording.

These people can tell you what happened 30 years ago on May 13 at 2 o'clock in the afternoon on page three of the book they were reading. That's how good some photographic memory is. But we don't [all] have photographic memory, probably because it's useless. It clutters things up. We get confused. But if we could turn it on and off, that would have enormous implications of being able to memorize things just by looking at them.

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What are the social consequences of "smart pills" or "forgetful pills"?

Initially, any technology is going to be for rich people because you have to pay the experimenter for his or her time. Then things become mass-produced. With time, [there's a possible price] drop to the point that it's for everybody.

What about telekinesis? How would the "brain net" affect our ability to travel in the universe?

Two ways. First of all, we may have surrogates in the futurerobots we control mentally. In other words, avatars. We'll send them into outer space because it's much cheaper to send a robot to the moon than a human, except it will have human intelligence because it's connected to a human being on Earth. In Japan, we've already connected a human to a robot.

One day, if we have Brain 2.0the ultimate goal of President Obama's Brain Initiative, a map of all the neuro-networks of the brainthat map contains your memory. It contains your dreams and desires, everything, in that disk. You can put that disk on a laser beam and shoot that laser beam into outer space. That would be the cheapest way to explore the universe, at the speed of light. No booster rockets, no oxygen to worry about, no weightlessness. You are sending pure consciousness into outer space.

And then it hits a relay station, and in the relay station you download this information and put it into a surrogate. So you wake up on another planet at the speed of light and have a superhuman body breathing toxic gases, frolicking in the supercold atmosphere. You'll have a superhuman mechanical body.

Even if we have the technology to fulfill these predictions, do you think people will truly want these advances?

The military wants this technologyexoskeletons, right? The military has all these wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan. They want to have them live a normal life, even if they're paralyzed. So the military is one of the main drivers of the Brain Machine Interface project, or BMI.

Workers and students will want to upload memories; people with Alzheimer's will want to upload memories. Memories in some sense define who we are. And if you flunked a course in college, wouldn't it be great to hit the play button and take that course [again]?

When we start to record these things, we're going to be recording dreams. A lot of people are going to want to see the dreams they had the previous night. The first dreams are being photographed even as we speak.

And the immediate goal of Brain Initiative is to cure mental illness. Mental illness is one of the great afflictions of modern societyit's mentioned in the Bible. It's ancient. Millions are affected by mental illness such as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and we're clueless about what it is and how it happens. But now with MRI scans, we can actually see how mental illness functions.

Recording your dreams: Is that for entertainment purposes, or is there a real scientific use?

At first, probably not. However, dreams, we think, will give you some insight into the working of the mind. If you take a brain scan of a person who is dreaming, the prefrontal cortex is shut off, meaning that there's no logic. The orbital frontal cortex is shut off, meaning that everything is crazy and haywire. But the amygdala is turned on, and that controls fear and emotions.

What dreams reveal is what you are anxious about, independent of the laws of physics. You have insight into what is fearful, what sources of anxiety you have that you may not be aware of.

Most of the brain's activity, we now realize, is unconscious. It's like a corporationthe CEO does not know what's happening at the lower levels of his own company. This will give us some insight into the unconscious mind, even though of course it opens the door for wild speculation.

Is there anything about the sci-fi future that makes you nervous?

A hundred years ago, we opened up the human body and many people were against it. They were fearful that the body is sacred. But now we have modern medicine. We want surgery if we are injured. We demand it.

The same thing [will be true] with the brain. It's the last part of the body to be opened up[it] is this black box. How is it hooked up? What does it do? Now, because of physics, we are beginning to understand how the brain works. And we're going to cure it when it misfires.

What are the most important philosophical questions about the mind?

Philosophers still debate the questions, Can machines think? Can animals think? They still debate that. I think in the future these questions will be considered rather silly. My attitude is that there's a continuum. A continuum of consciousness, a continuum of thinking. And one day perhaps machines will think even better than us, in which case the machines will ask, Can humans think? No wayjust look at humans. Give me a break.

[Now], we're talking about who we are. Are we our memories, are we nothing but a bunch of information that you can put on a disk? I mean, what are we, anyway?